Let's talk about the internet's favorite way of cooking mushrooms: not in oil or butter
or any other kind of fat, at least not at first.
The internet's favorite way is to cook mushrooms in a little bit of water as though it were
oil.
Then, if you want, you can put in a little oil at the very end to brown them off.
Every time I cook mushrooms on the internets, I get lots of people asking me, "Hey, don't
you know about the water trick?"
Apart from its culinary virtues, which I do not deny, the water trick also has all of
the ingredients of a 21st century viral recipe hack.
I mean, admit it.
A lot of us get really excited by anything that seems to contradict classical culinary
dogma, and by classical, of course, I mean French.
Everybody gets things wrong sometimes, but the French culinary establishment is often
both wrong and snooty about it, which is a punchable combination.
French dogma states that getting mushrooms wet is the worst thing you can do to them.
You'll waterlog them and dilute their flavor.
That's why the classical way of cleaning mushrooms is to just brush off the dirt, no washing,
and that's probably mostly silly because mushrooms squeeze the water back out again when they
cook.
Sauteing mushrooms in water feels like a very satisfying repudiation of something that's
highly questionable from our past, and it's a good method that I will demonstrate to you
now.
I will also tell you why I usually don't do it.
I usually cook mushrooms the conventional way.
Anyway, a mushroom is kind of like a piece of bread in that it is comprised of a fibrous
structural network enclosing some water, but mostly air.
That foamy structure is just harder to see in a mushroom because it's a much finer structure.
Even with this microscope, you can just barely see some of the tiny little air pockets inside
this seemingly solid mass.
If we look over here with the gills in the background, you can see these tiny little
hairs.
That's the leading edge of the hyphae.
Basically, the entire mushroom is made out of those little threads, densely interwoven
into what looks like a solid, but there's actually tons and tons of empty space between
the threads.
The threads comprising bread are just made out of gluten proteins, not strings of fungal
cells, unless your bread is super moldy.
But it's a similar structure, it's just bigger.
Say I wanted to brown this in a pan like a mushroom.
I'd heat a generous film of oil, drop the bread in, let the crust solidify to the point
where it won't tear when I try to release it from the pan, same thing you do with meat.
Then I'll move it around a little, and when side one is done, I will flip it.
But look, there's no oil left in there to brown the other side.
All the oil has diffused into the vacant cavities inside the bread.
I have to add more oil to brown the other side.
At this point, our giant crouton is almost soaked through with oil.
It tastes better than I'd like to admit, but it's not something you'd want to eat every
day.
This is what happens when you try to brown mushrooms in oil.
You dump them in.
The first couple minutes of cooking go really well.
We're getting some nice brown color and flavor that I can smell, but all of a sudden the
oil is just gone.
The pan feels dry, and I'm tempted to add even more oil.
I have a whole video in the description about why we cook food in oil to begin with, but
the basic thing is that it serves as a thermal interface.
It fills the gaps between the surface of the pan and the food, and it transmits heat up
into the food.
If you try to cook a mushroom in a totally dry pan, it sticks really bad, ouch, and it
smells and tastes bad because the tiny bits that are in direct contact with the pan are
burning, while the rest of the surface is just steaming.
We need oil to distribute the heat more evenly.
Anyway, the spongy structure of the mushroom absorbs the oil, and that's not the only bad
thing that happens.
After a couple of minutes, the hyphae network starts to break down and collapse as cells
are ruptured and the water inside the mushroom spills out.
At this point, the pan starts spitting like crazy and making a mess.
Water hits the hot oil and explodes as steam.
If you're only cooking a few mushrooms at a time, this is merely an inconvenience, but
nobody cooks this few mushrooms at a time because mushrooms shrink a ton when you cook
them.
So you need to start with a big pile of mushrooms in your pan, and that works fine until they
start to release their water, at which point the pan is flooded with water and the temperature
plummets.
Just like when you crowd a pan with meat, you cannot brown anything in water.
You have to wait until you've evaporated it all out if you want to try to get some more
color on these, which you can do.
I do sometimes, and the result of such conventional mushroom cookery is undeniably delicious,
though maybe not the best thing for me to eat with all of the oil that is in and on
the mushrooms.
Maybe instead, I'll have a bowl of cereal from Magic Spoon, sponsor of this video.
Hey, the Birthday Cake flavor is now a member of their permanent roster, plus it is also
Magic Spoon's birthday, April.
Being a person who is constantly trying to replace some of the carbs and fats in his
diet with more protein, Magic Spoon is really the perfect thing for me.
This is a kid-like breakfast cereal, something that kind of tastes like junk from your childhood,
except that instead of being made of grain, it is mostly made out of milk protein.
It's a protein shake that they turned into a cereal.
Pretty cool.
This particular flavor, the Birthday Cake, has zero total sugars, four net carbs, and
a whopping 13 grams of protein.
That's really good.
The texture is very crispy, very close to what you would expect from a normal breakfast
cereal, and the flavor is identical to what you remember from childhood.
Hit my QR code right here or use my special link magicspoon.com/RAGUSEABDAY.
With that, you'll get a free box of birthday cake with your order of Magic Spoon cereal.
QR code or magicspoon.com/RAGUSEABDAY, you'll get a free box of this with a box of this,
whatever cereal you want.
What else I got in here?
Oh, Fruity.
That's my favorite one, but the Birthday Cake is pretty close.
Thank you, Magic Spoon.
Anyway, cooking mushrooms with water.
There's lots of different ways to do this, but what I'm demonstrating is literally using
water in the place of oil, a thin film of water in a hot pan.
Mushrooms in, and the water is also a very effective thermal interface.
These don't stick to the pan, and they start to cook down very fast because the water is
spreading all that heat all around the mushroom.
Only problem is there is less heat because under normal atmospheric conditions, water
can only get to 100 degrees centigrade before it evaporates, and that's just not hot enough
to brown these.
What we do instead is just cook these until that spongy hyphae structure has collapsed,
and the mushrooms have pushed out most of their own water.
We wait for everything to evaporate.
This is where things usually go wrong for me because ideally I don't want to cook the
mushrooms so thoroughly.
I like to cook them until they've shrunk by about half.
These have shrunk by more than that, but I have to keep cooking them to evaporate all
of that water so that I can eventually brown these.
There is zero color on these mushrooms because they have not yet seen any hot oil.
You got to cook almost all the water out, and then you can put in a little oil, brown
the surface, and those are very, very nice.
This is a good way of cooking mushrooms and less messy because you don't get that spitting
stage.
My only criticism is I think the texture tends to be a little leathery because I think this
method usually overcooks the mushrooms a little.
People will tell you that you can't overcook mushrooms.
It's impossible.
I mean, plants you can definitely overcook because their cell walls are reinforced chiefly
with pectin, and pectin just breaks down during cooking.
The cell walls of fungi, like mushrooms, those are reinforced with this stuff called chitin,
which is a polymer.
It's kind of like a carb, but also kind of like a protein.
What matters is that it's much more stable at high temperatures.
It doesn't break down as much.
So yeah, you don't really ever cook mushrooms down into mush.
You'd have to really try to do that.
But you can fully collapse that hyphae structure, and the result is a little unpleasantly dense
to my taste.
When I cook mushrooms conventionally in oil, I try to start really hot and fast to get
some color on them before the water comes out.
Then I just cook them as long as I want.
I usually don't bother trying to evaporate all the water for a second browning phase.
I just cook them until they've shrunk by about half.
At that point, it feels to me like the structure has not fully collapsed.
There's still some cavities in the core of that mushroom, and the texture is more pleasant
to me.
Now look, I am not sure of the explanation that I just gave.
I have not scientifically proven that that's the mechanism responsible for the textural
difference that I'm experiencing.
But here's some evidence.
A raw mushroom slice will float in water because it's filled with all of those tiny airy cavities.
Here's my conventionally sauteed mushroom slice.
It doesn't float, but it also doesn't plummet right to the bottom either.
It takes its time getting down there because there's still some air inside that structure.
Here's the mushroom slice we cooked in water before browning it in oil, and it sinks like
a stone because we had to cook it until its internal cavities had fully collapsed, or
at least that is my hypothesis about what's going on here.
An alternative explanation would be that the conventionally sauteed mushroom just absorbed
more oil and oil floats too.
People say that that's the problem with conventionally sauteed mushrooms, that they just absorb way
too much oil and they're too greasy.
Maybe you don't like that for health reasons.
Maybe you don't like that for just textural or experiential reasons or whatever, but I'm
not totally sure that I'm convinced that that's what happens here, that the mushroom that's
sauteed in oil absorbs way more oil than any other mushroom because you can plainly see
that even though the mushrooms absorb a ton of oil, they squeeze some of it back out again
as they cook and shrink.
Resist the temptation to add more oil, and eventually, you will find the pan feeling
greasy again because some of the oil pushes back out.
I have no idea how much, and I'm sure it depends on how you cut the mushrooms, etc.
Cook your mushrooms either way.
Both methods work, and the results are very, very similar.
But the next time somebody gets in touch and asks why I don't usually use the water trick,
now I have a video that I can just send in response.